By the third day, she felt tired in her bones, and it was a lovely feeling. Sky and sea, sea and sky. The sun breaking through the clouds occasionally with a brilliant copper slash. Sunrise and sunset were explosive theatrical performances of light, but cloud covered up the sky through most of the days, sparing her from being baked by the sun like dark bread in an oven. She had dropped her fishing line several times, but there appeared to be no fish left in the sea. Or they had no taste for canned herring or soggy pieces of pumpernickel. Lots of water left, though, and some tinned meat. Somewhere up ahead, there would be fish.
Tired, tired, tired. Eighty years tired and sleep was her soul-mate on this voyage. A monarch butterfly passed by on the third day, alighted on the gunwale, resting. The wonder of it all, a thing like this so far at sea, making its way back to land, knowing which way to go. Geese high up in the sky in a ragged V, or W sometimes, heading west along the coat before turning south. Something zipped by her face one day when her eyes were closed so she missed it, but she thought it was a hummingbird, departing for South America from Nova Scotia. She was out here on the wide, wide sea among many other travellers.
The sea and sky became all the things of her life to her. She could look up into the muted ripples of clouds and see herself as a little girl, see her dreams, see the faces of the men she loved. It was quite a crowd really. Talk filled her head. Men's talk. Their
ambitions, their shared wisdom, their own fears. Philosophy crowded the boat for awhile and then simpler things. What was real and what was not real seemed entirely irrelevant. Not once did she regret having taken up the oars and leaving the island for this journey. Her head was filled with a pattern. Something like patches of lives all being unified together into a big, grand quilt. Each patch was colourful and had its own pattern, yet, when stitched in with the next one, it seemed even grander. Sylvie saw each patch as the life of someone who had been part of her life, and she was the old, widowed quilt-maker. Without her doing the stitching, all those lives would not make the unity. Each would be important unto itself, but she was the one who had the task of completion.
The quilt in her mind was simply the lives of people on the island. And in order to restore what was once the island, she must do this thing. She must row out to sea and search. Search and think. Let the current take her where it must until something is restored, until something is achieved. That's where her thoughts would stop. She knew this was not logical or rational, and she would not try to explain it to anyone. If, that is, she ever saw anyone again. The motivation came from deep within her. And it was a form of knowledge, not unlike her ability at dowsing. Things she knew. She knew it was wrong to try to hammer it into place with fences made of words.
By the fourth day, she had renamed the North Atlantic several times: the Sea of Love, the Sea of Clouds, the Sea of Serenity, the Sea of Fertility, the Sea of Nectar, the Lake of Dreams, then the Sea of Crosses, the Sea of Cold, and finally, yet again, the Sea of Tranquility. She felt herself drowning in all that sky around her and treasured the small irony of the emotions that went along with it. And when the first real taste of wind came up, she began to row into it. But her effort did not last long.
On her fifth day at sea, Sylvie felt light-headed. There was
not a sign of a fish for food or a whale for companionship. Her food had run out. She had been less cautious than she thought. There was still some water left. Sylvie was stunned at her bad luck. Maybe the news stories were right. The sea itself was dying.
Sky and sea. Sea and sky. As if it was all she ever knew. She guessed she was twenty miles out, maybe more. Nothing to be afraid of, really. The worst that could happen was, well, not so bad. Some act of completion was what this was all about. Time to start rowing again.
She fit the oars into her hands. The wood felt good against her palms, despite the blisters, despite the fact that she had no idea exactly where she was going. She knew that something in her brain, in her thoughts, in the sum total of the memory of who she was â that was what was driving her to do this. She tested many words to see if they fit: madness, divine intervention, instinct, whimsy. The word “suicide” surfaced and she worried over it for a while, slowing her pace at the oars. Did she believe this was some kind of useful sacrifice for the island? Would her exodus, her demise, appease the bad luck gods of sea and government and restore hope for the island? Maybe that was somehow part of it, but she did not feel motivated by self-destruction.
Sylvie looked up at the grey sky and searched in vain yet again for the line that was the horizon. Sky and sea were all the same. She had rowed herself into some serene, pleasant limbo world, neither earth nor heaven. A watery halfway universe. She would continue to test other words. It was search, yes. That was certainly part of it. She had expectations. She would find the whales. Perhaps she could persuade them to return. Someday they would visit the island again, as they had in her childhood. Maybe that alone was the single, necessary act of completion. But what good would it do? She knew she was too far to sea to ever row herself back home and even now she was still probably
rowing away from land. Only a fierce blast of wind from the east and south would send her back home, and she was sure she could not handle the dory in a such a rough sea.
But why was she not afraid?
It was the middle of the day when she first felt nauseous and dizzy. She pulled once more upon the oars and then set them at rest, propped against the gunwales. She felt her vision blur and then darkness began to beckon her. At first she thought it was mere exhaustion. She was falling asleep. But then her mind flooded with confusion. It didn't feel right. Then she felt her right leg losing feeling, and then her arm. For the first time on her voyage, fear overpowered her. She was losing her ability to control her arm. She slipped sideways, falling into the bottom of the boat as she curled up into a fetal position. Holding onto the briefest fragment of consciousness, Sylvie tried to convince herself this was all a dream. All of it. In the morning she would wake and she would be young again. David would be asleep beside her in the bed. There would be mist on the panes of glass by her bedroom window. Outside on the lawn, the spiderwebs would be laden with jewels of morning dew.
By nightfall, an extended family of right whales that had travelled thousands of miles in the Atlantic Ocean arrived at where the dory floated upon the dark mirror of the sea. There was no great hurry to move on to any other place than this. Deep below were krill and small fishes to feed upon. Here was this boat afloat upon the water with a woman asleep. A tug at something deep inside a sea creature's consciousness may have acknowledged something familiar about the person inside and quickly become aware of her vulnerability.
When the phone rang in Brian Gullett's little cubbyhole of an office at the
Herald
, he let it ring three times before he picked it up. Nothing was going to surprise him. What was the hurry? But it
was
a pleasant surprise. The PR person at the Sea Guardian headquarters in New York said they had some of Gullett's stories in their clipping file. One of their research vessels was leaving Boston at six that evening. They wondered if he wanted to go along on the twelve-day cruise.
Brian was ready to jump and wanted to know how high but he contained himself.“Some kind of confrontation at sea?” The Sea Guardian Society was world famous for its fearless confrontations with the Norwegians, the Japanese, and the Russians over whale killing. For Gullett, sullen and shackled to a desk in Halifax, this was a dream come true.
“'Fraid it's not that glamorous. We've been doing some independent research about fish stocks and about whales, right whales in particular â their migration habits. We're going out to verify what's going on. The American and Canadian governments are lying. We want to get at the bottom of the things. Are you in?”
“Yes.”
He'd simply insist that his boss let him do this. Let the chips fall where they may. He left e-mail messages for the editor and a couple of other people, said nothing to anybody, grabbed his laptop, and, realizing he had no time to go home to shave, pack, or feed his budgie (he'd call his neighbour to take care of that), he split for the airport and caught the afternoon flight to Boston.
Gullett was licking his chops when he found out he was the only Canadian news guy on board the
Belize
. Three Yanks were on hand. Steve Neffler from the
New York Times
, Mary Soucoup from the
Boston Globe
, and a sole PBS reporter with a Betacam. Gullett was hoping that the Sea Guardian PR guy had lied to him and that a real at-sea faceoff was in the brew.
At an informal briefing in a sparsely appointed but expensive-looking stateroom, the legendary Gale Jardine, current CEO of Sea Guardian, offered them all a Heineken and gave a low-key lowdown. “We're certain it's mostly global warming. But there's more. We've been shovelling data, hard data, into a computer at MIT for about a year now. It's indisputable. Toxic concentrations distributed by the Gulf Stream into critical areas. That plus the obvious: overfishing. Overfishing has been a nightmare. Up and down the food chain it's a mess. And it's a mess worldwide. We've been going for the emotional appeal of nailing Norwegians in their bloody torture fest and harassing the Japanese with their drift nets choking the dolphins, but some of us finally woke up one morning and realized that it's bigger than all that and more deadly. Trouble is, on paper it all sounds a little too boring.
“I mean the ocean temp goes up a degree in one place and down a degree in another, how the hell you gonna get Joe Cool to lift an eyebrow? That's why we need you.”
“Mind if I have another beer?” Neffler wasn't trying to be rude. Like the others, he was probably just a bit disappointed.
Gale rolled her eyes.“Help yourself.”
“You've taken on a big job,” Gullett told her to bolster her spirits. He liked her immensely and it wasn't just the tan and the body. He had wrestled with really important stories throughout his career that never got the coverage they deserved. There always had to be a hook. An easy hook. Kid hit by a drunk driver. Politician caught with his pants down. If it was really deadly and dumped in a river, it wasn't even of interest unless someone who was rich and famous rolled into the hospital on a gurney as a result. But he knew the real stories were in the big picture, in the number crunching and the research.
Neffler popped the cap on the beer, as did PBS. Gale looked directly at them and continued. “Global warming â now there's a dull thud for the public, I know. Fossil fuels. Cars.
Cities. All to blame. The ice cap is melting and it's still a big yawn. Water's colder off Nova Scotia from the melt, warmer farther south. Fish could have bounced back once the moratorium came into effect but they didn't. They lost a generation â teenage cod, so to speak. There's the lead, boys and girls. âTeenage cod lose their way.' Can't teach the younger ones where to go and when. Same with other fish. And as a result of the warming trend, the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current have shifted ever so slightly. It's like someone screwed around big time with an Interstate highway and you never know for sure which lane is going which way.
“The beauty of it is â if I can stretch the meaning of that word â that it's happening in our own backyard. The North Atlantic. Nobody can get excited about the death of the poor old tommy cod anymore. But now we have whales in the picture.”
Brian cleared his throat, set his half-empty beer down. “They were a no-show all along the Atlantic side of Nova Scotia this year. Any connection?”
“Give the man a cigar.”
“Don't tell me the automobile killed the right whale?”
“Not quite. Just confused him as much as the codfish. The right whales aren't off Peggy's Cove this summer and nobody's seeing them off Cape Cod, that's for sure, but they're out there. Mind you, the entire North Atlantic population is down to less than three hundred. We lose a dozen more each year that get tangled in nets or plowed into by container ships. But I'm going to take you to see some of the survivors.” She was all fired up, but Brian could tell his media chums were looking at what they thought was a real waste of their time.
“So who's out there killing them this time? The Icelanders?” Neffler was still sure there was a kicker in here. The Sea Guardian didn't get its rep from backroom nerds on computers studying tide charts and water temperature. They kicked ass.
“No, don't you see? We are. They're confused about where to be and when. If they can't adapt to the changes, and I'm not sure they can, they die. Same thing might happen to us in the long run if we don't get this problem nailed down.”
Gullett had swallowed hook, line, and sinker, but the rest were less than thrilled. Gale registered the lack of interest.“Well, folks, we got you here now. Unless you want to foot the bill for your own helicopter flight back to Boston, I'm hoping you'll want to find the sexiest angle you can possibly spin on this. We've got people here to help you. Please,” she said. She was almost pleading now. “It's damn important.” Then she let out a big sigh.“Don't worry. We'll feed you good. There's lots of beer. Movies if you need 'em.”
She left, not fully certain she had done her job. Was this just going to end up being a very expensive whale-watching cruise or what?
Brian tried to get eye contact with her but she was gone. Neffler sat shaking his head. “I had Knicks tickets, too.” But Brian was taking the whole thing very seriously.
On the third day out, boredom settled in among the press gallery like an unwanted companion. Neffler had already wired a very negative story back to the
Times
about how the Sea Guardian had lost its edge. He didn't seem to mind that he'd be treated like an enemy on board ship. PBS was holding off on airing anything yet. Nothing but a calm sea to show. No whales, no nothing but grey sky and a gunmetal sea, flat as piss on a plate. Mary Soucoup had tried to muster some enthusiasm and at least some feminist support for Gale and her cause but all she ended up with was a half column buried in the back of the Sunday paper with the headline, “Environmental Group Studies Problem With North Atlantic.” With a headline like that it would never get read.